


Guard Duty

by flipflop_diva



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Attempt at Humor, Aurors, Bodyguard, Boy-Who-Lived Neville Longbottom, Gen, Pre-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-08 07:24:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15925655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/pseuds/flipflop_diva
Summary: The Aurors of the Nine-Nine have a new assignment — protect Boy Who Lived Neville Longbottom at all costs. No matter how boring it might be.





	Guard Duty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveradept](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/gifts).



> Written for the 2018 AU Exchange.
> 
> silveradept actually had two different prompts — the B99 gang as aurors and Neville as the Boy Who Lived. I really loved both of them and though combining them could be super fun. I hope everyone enjoys this!

The assignment was easy. At least in theory.

“Auror Section Nine-Nine has been assigned guard duty of one Neville Longbottom,” Commander Holt read out to them, “by Order of the Ministry of Magic until such time that his safety is no longer in question.”

“Oh, come on!” Jake let out an exasperated sigh. “Now we’re babysitting ‘The Chosen One’?” — he raised his hands to use quote marks around the last three words, his voice rising to a high-pitched level he thought only dogs could fully understand. “I thought we were supposed to get a cool assignment?”

“This is a super cool assignment!” Amy cut in, because Amy always had to cut in, apparently offended by Jake’s lack of enthusiasm. “There is no greater assignment than making sure The Boy Who Lived is safe and protected so he can defeat the Dark Lord when the time comes!”

“Why can’t we just defeat the Dark Lord ourselves when the time comes?” Rosa was leaning back in her chair, waving her wand around, small circles of green smoke emanating out of its tip. 

Jake thought she had a point. Amy did not agree.

“Because,” Amy said, “only Neville can do that. Duh.”

“Baloney,” Rosa said. “Divination is stupid. No such thing as a prophecy.”

“Then why is there a whole room at the Ministry devoted to them?” Amy asked.

“The Ministry is stupid.”

“Rosa!” Amy’s face contorted in a most scandalized expression. “You can’t say things like that! We work for them!”

“Whatever,” she said. “You can do the babysitting.”

At that, Amy turned back to Commander Holt. “I would be honored, Sir, to protect The Boy Who Lived Neville Longbottom.”

“Great,” Holt said. “You and Peralta take first shift. Diaz and Jeffords, you take second. Scully and Hitchcock …” Holt looked up, noticed the two of them playing a version of Muggle tic-tac-toe with chocolate frogs and sighed. “Never mind.”

“Sir! Sir!” Charles waved his arm in the air. “Let me go with Jake and Amy. Puh-leeeeeease.”

“You can go with me,” Holt said. “Gina, you can handle logistics.”

Gina glanced up from where she was reading the latest issue of The Quibbler. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “I’ll get right on that.”

•••

Jake and Amy met Neville Longbottom and his best friends Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood in a crowded Three Broomsticks on the first Hogsmeade Weekend of the term. In between the throngs of Hogwarts students bumping into each other and squealing from eating too much candy, none of them really noticed the small group sitting in the corner, even if Jake thought that Neville’s disguise wasn’t much of a disguise. The blonde hair just did not suit him at all, even if Gina had said it was the best disguise she had ever created.

Of course, Neville seemed awkward about the whole entire thing, not just the hair. Luna seemed disinterested. She kept reading an issue of The Quibbler — upside down for some reason — and didn’t even notice when Jake swapped his empty butterbeer mug for her full one. (Amy, though, glared at him when he did that, like it was the worst offense he had ever committed, let alone not even the worst offense of the past five minutes.)

Hermione, for her part, seemed unsure about all of them.

“You,” she said in a tone that seemed much too snotty for the circumstances, Jake thought, “are really going to protect us?”

“We are aurors, yes,” Jake said, making sure to slurp up his last few drops of butterbeer. No matter where he got it from, it always seemed better when he got it from the Three Broomsticks. Nostalgia maybe, he decided, from his days at Hogwarts.

He felt an elbow in the side. Amy’s.

Right. He had been saying. They were aurors. Trained aurors.

Hermione looked like she thought they might have actually escaped from Azkaban instead, but she looked at Amy when she spoke. “Alright.”

“Look,” Jake said. “We want to do this about as much as you want us to do this.” No one said anything. 

“That is, we don’t,” he clarified.

“Isn’t it your job to want to?” Neville asked. For a Chosen One, he seemed awfully timid to Jake.

“What? No!” Jake said. “I signed up for this gig to get the cool assignments!”

Hermione, of course, looked even more displeased by this statement. Amy, too.

“Whatever,” Jake said, “The point is, no one here is leaping for joy over any of this. But we all have to just suck it up. If all goes well, it will only be for a day or two. A week at most.”

•••

It went on for much longer than a week. Though after about a week, Commander Holt decided he had more important things to do and assigned all the remaining shifts to Jake and Amy and to Rosa and Terry. Charles, for his part, seemed to drop by every morning, afternoon and night with food, like he was some kind of untrained House Elf.

“I just don’t see how us staying in this _place_ ...” Hermione wrinkled her nose as she looked around at the small, rundown, three-bedroom flat they were all crammed in, in the middle of a busy Muggle street in downtown London. “… is helping matters. If the Dark Lord is going to come after us and Neville is the only one who can stop him, shouldn’t we be doing more than just waiting for him to come to us?”

“Ughh,” Jake said. They were all sitting around the kitchen table, picking at some really gross looking sandwiches Charles had brought for them. “Finally. Something we actually agree on. I didn’t think it was possible.”

“So if you agree, shouldn’t we do something about it?”

“What do you want to do? Sneak out and fight the Dark Lord?” He looked up from examing the meat — if it could be called meat — on his sandwich to see a very determined expression on Hermione’s face. “Oh my Merlin!” he said. “You want to sneak out and fight the Dark Lord!”

“Of course not,” she said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. “I want to sneak out and figure out a way to help Neville defeat the Dark Lord.”

Jake didn’t see the difference, but no matter.

“I’m listening,” he said.

“I’m not,” Amy said. “And you should not be either.”

“Oh, come on, Ames,” Jake said. “Even you can’t be happy sitting here day after day. Besides, think how much Holt would love you if we came up with a way to defeat the Dark Lord?”

Amy looked unsure. “I don’t know …”

“If rule-follower Granger over here can be willing to break the rules, surely you can too?”

“She won’t get in trouble if we’re caught.”

“We won’t be caught,” Hermione said. She sounded so confident, Jake had no problem believing her, even though he probably should have had at least some problem believing her. But Amy did look a smidge less worried at her pronouncement.

“Fine,” Amy said. “Tell us. What did you have in mind? I guess it can’t hurt to hear you out.”

Hermione smiled at that, picked up the tiny little beaded bag she always had with her and rummaged through it, finally pulling out the biggest scroll of paper Jake had ever seen in his life and two quills. She spread the paper out on the table and smiled up at him, Amy and Neville.

“Tell me,” she said, and Jake had never heard her sound more enthused. “What do you know about Horcruxes?”


End file.
